1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention pertain to a system and method for properly routing telephone calls made by callers using the public telecommunications network. Specifically, embodiments relate to a method for incorporating a commercial location and data services that reside on remote computer networks and are available only via so-called web services, into an interactive voice response system to provide superior call routing and caller abandon rates.
2. Discussion of Background Information
The workhorse of the public telecommunications network, plain old telephone service (POTS) has historically been highly geographic in nature: every POTS number is essentially tied to a loop of copper from the local telephone company facility to its subscribers' homes or offices. The original design of the landline network, together with the rules used to assign telephone numbers to these facilities, resulted in a dependable and reasonably accurate correlation between a caller's telephone number and their physical, geographic location.
Many businesses still rely upon this correlation in order to properly handle inbound calls using special techniques to route callers to the office, store or service location that best pertains to some aspect of the caller's location, e.g., geographic coordinates, state, county, zip code, time zone, et al. In addition, some businesses require the caller's location in order to determine the appropriate interactive voice response (IVR) treatment, i.e., direct termination, call-prompt, county-routing, etc. The location of the caller is inferred by cross-referencing the area code and exchange of the caller's telephone number with telecommunications databases which give the geographic location of the local telephone company's facility that provides service to the caller.
Such databases are readily available from a number of sources, e.g. Telcordia Technology's “Local Exchange Routing Guide”; these databases are normally uploaded to a data storage and retrieval facility which is housed close to the equipment used to route calls, and are accessible via an internal local area network; such databases are said to be “on-net”. In general, on-net assets reside on high performance hardware and networks, with very low levels of latency and errors. Call routing services use on-net databases to determine the appropriate service location for a given inbound call.
Several factors have combined to significantly erode the correlation between caller's telephone numbers and their geographic location. Most notable is the proliferation of mobile telephones, which surpassed landline telephones in 2005; by 2013, more than one-third of Americans relied solely on their mobile phone, and a mobile phone was the primary telephone in more than half of US households. Although some of these devices are used within their original area codes' service areas, rarely are they used exclusively at the subscribers' homes, and frequently they're used outside their original area codes' service areas.
In addition, changes in the way blocks of new telephone numbers are assigned to telecommunications carriers, including wireless carriers, and especially those carriers whose networks are based on “voice over IP” (VoIP) technology, and a de facto loosening of the rules used to assign numbers to underlying facilities, have also served to compromise the correlation between telephone number and inferred location.
All of these factors have combined to make it increasingly problematic to provide proper routing for inbound telephone calls.
Since the nature of wireless telecommunications requires that wireless carriers know the physical location of mobile devices, wireless carriers have designed and built the appropriate location technologies into their wireless communications networks and control systems. Wireless carriers have leveraged these capabilities to offer a variety of so-called “location-based services” (LBS) directly to their own subscribers; they also offer access to their networks' location platforms to qualified aggregators. These aggregators function as a clearinghouse, providing a wide range of value-added services that seamlessly span a number of disparate wireless carriers. For example, Syniverse is a location-based service provider, offering access to the latitude and longitude of a number of wireless carriers' mobile subscribers, via real-time queries and common web-based application objects, over the public internet. Due to the fact that this information is derived from network telemetry in real-time, it can only be accessed remotely.
Access to other telecommunications databases is readily available; such databases contain a range of information about telephone numbers, including billing addresses. For example, AT&T's “Information Retrieval Service” provides a wide variety of information about a given telephone number, and Neustar's “Power Port Search” provides access to a number of authoritative telecommunications databases—again, via real-time queries and common web-based application objects, over the public internet. Due to the size, complexity, fluidity, and proprietary nature of these databases, it is not feasible that they would be downloaded to others' platforms—they are only accessible remotely, via the technologies described above.
Such remotely accessible real-time information and databases are said to be “off-net”. In general, off-net assets tend to have a very different performance profile: retrieval times are often measured in seconds, as opposed to milliseconds; for example, the time required to derive the location of a mobile caller can vary from 4 to 16 seconds. Error rates can also be orders of magnitude higher; whereas an on-net database might have an error rate of 108, the figure for an off-net service could reasonably be 10−2.
The difference between on-net and off-net performance figures is all the more critical in light of the abandon rates for calls processed by IVRs, which tend to rise dramatically the longer a caller must wait for their call to be routed.
What is wanted, then, is a technique that allows the IVR to manage a caller's telephone experience independently of the off-net application gateways' performance characteristics—a technique that affords call routing services the ability to interact with off-net providers to obtain critical routing data, while at the same time retaining the flexibility to manage that interaction using best practices for interactive voice response.
Note that although networks and systems based on E911 technologies are indeed capable of routing calls based on location, these algorithms are entirely unsuited for commercial use, due to the length of time required to route the call. Emergency callers have no alternative but to wait up to 30-45 seconds for the network to resolve their location; it is common experience that someone calling in response to a billboard, print or radio advertisement would abandon the call in a small fraction of this time.